The Ripper's Wife(36)
“Mrs. Maybrick, you’re a thoroughly silly woman!” she said, and I still can’t quite believe it. Jim actually laughed when I told him! But I got my pink bunnies just the same.
My dressmaker had made Gladys a fairy princess costume in three shades of purple, her favorite color, with enormous puffed sleeves and silver stars and crystal beads sewn all over the big, frothy tulle crinoline skirt, and silver lace wings in back. I had given her an amethyst heart on a silver chain to wear with it, but Nanny Yapp pursed her lips, shook her head, and said Gladys was much too young for jewelry, that such ornamentation at her age would appear “vulgar and ostentatious,” and suggested that Sir Jim—“Sir Jim” was what she had taken to calling my husband; she’d given him that name when he and Bobo were playing at knights rescuing the fair Princess Gladys, grabbing a toy sword and tapping him on the shoulder and solemnly intoning, “I dub thee Sir Jim of Battlecrease House! ”—put it in his safe until she was sixteen.
“Stuff and nonsense!” I retorted. “She’ll wear it to the party, and any other suitable occasion, and I don’t want to hear another word about it!”
With her hair arranged in a mass of gleaming licorice-black ringlets framing the pale heart of her face and her violet-blue eyes drinking in all that purple, Gladys was a lovely little princess, and I just knew Mama had been right. Despite Gladys’s puny plainness at birth, she was well on her way to blossoming into a beautiful woman. I was thinking I should start offering both my children’s services as models to some of the more respectable artists for sentimental postcards and calendars and such, but Mrs. Briggs and Nanny Yapp were aghast at the idea and it was their opinion that counted with Jim, though I hadn’t entirely given up on trying to talk him around.
I don’t think a child ever lived who had such a magnificent behemoth of a birthday cake. It was an enormous thing, six tiers high—one sweet, sumptuous chocolate layer for each year of Gladys’s life—covered with so many purple, lavender, and lilac icing roses you could barely see the white buttercream beneath, so that every child would be sure to get at least one, and there were exquisitely sculpted sugar fairies stuck on long, thin pins hovering like hummingbirds over the whole thing that would be given as prizes by the drawing of lots to twenty lucky children. I remembered being six years old myself and weeping at a friend’s birthday party because her cake only had three roses and that greedy little vixen and her two sisters got them all. Well, no child would have cause to cry over icing roses at this party if I could help it!
When Jim and I finally left my bedroom, we went at once to the nursery. We wanted to spend some time alone with the children before the party began. Both of them came running, flying into our arms. Nanny Yapp protested that it was most indecorous for the children to be running about and receiving guests, even their parents, in their underclothes and curl rags, but Jim and I were in mutual accord and elected to ignore her.
Gladys settled herself on Jim’s knee, in her chemise and bloomers, both threaded with purple silk ribbon and embroidered, by my own loving hand, with a border of violets, and Bobo, still in his angelic white nightgown, claimed my lap as his throne.
In honor of Gladys’s birthday, Jim had bought them a new storybook, The Happy Prince and Other Tales, by Oscar Wilde, that contained five of the most beautiful stories I had ever read; I couldn’t get through half of them without weeping. The author’s words just seemed to leap right off the page and touch my heart every time.
Though stories were usually reserved for bedtime, “today,” Jim said, “warrants a very special story that cannot wait until bed.” He opened the green pebbled leather cover and began to read us the tale of the Happy Prince.
It was the story of the statue of an angel-beautiful boy mounted atop a tall pillar, his slim body encased in gold leaf, with sapphires for his eyes and a ruby in the hilt of his sword. When he was alive the Prince lived only for pleasure and was protected by the high palace walls from all the ugliness, meanness, and misery of the world, but in death, as a statue perched high above the city, he saw it all. So greatly did he feel the weight of the world’s sorrows that he wept. But there was nothing he could give to alleviate it except himself. A sympathetic swallow postponed flying away to the warmth of Egypt for the winter to become the Prince’s emissary; he stripped the Prince of his jewels and gold leaf to help the shivering, hungry poor. The swallow delayed his departure too long, too loyal to forsake the now blind prince, and died of the cold. At that moment the Prince’s lead heart broke. The Town Councillors, so upset at how ugly and shabby the statue had become, ordered it melted down to salvage the lead, bickering all the while about which one of them most deserved a statue of himself. Curiously, the Prince’s broken heart would not melt, so they threw it, and the poor little dead bird, upon the rubbish heap.
Tears poured down my face, and Bobo’s cheek, against my own, was just as wet, as my husband read the story’s bittersweet ending:
“ ‘Bring me the two most precious things in the city,’ said God to one of His Angels; and the Angel brought him the leaden heart and the dead bird.
“ ‘You have rightly chosen,’ said God, ‘for in my garden of Paradise this little bird shall sing for evermore, and in my city of gold the Happy Prince shall praise me.’ ”
As Jim closed the book, Bobo used the sleeve of his nightgown to wipe my tears away.